As Brian Micklethwait noted the other day, the UK news satire quiz show, Have I Got News For You, is sometimes a quite accurate barometer of how opinion is trending among what I might call the self-consciously trendy chattering classes. The latest episode was compered by some comedian I vaguely recognised who looks like a slightly supercilious upper sixth former. Understandably, a lot of the quiz was taken up with taking the piss out of the disgusting Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, over his recent shambolic performance over the Damian Green affair. Like Brian, I am now going to recall the following bit of dialogue. There will be some words missing but here is the gist of it:
Ian Hislop: It is amazing, isn’t it, that they were were able to get 20 or so policemen to raid Mr Green’s offices and search his house. Where are all these guys when you need to catch a burglar or something?
Compere: Ah, yes, that sounds like the sort of drivel you read in the Daily Mail.
Hislop: So let me get this right – are you saying that is perfectly okay for a bunch of anti-terror policemen to arrest, search and hold an MP for asking annoying questions in the House of Commons?
Compere: I am in all in favour of putting Tory MPs in jail.
Hislop: raised eyebrows, obviously thinking to himself “I cannot believe this fascist prick, how did we get him on the show”?
Like I said, HIGNFY is an interesting temperature gauge on UK current affairs. And my impression was that Hislop regarded the Damian Green affair as an outrage, while a lefty “comedian” regards it is acceptable to crack jokes about locking up MPs just because of their views. These supposedly “edgy” or “cutting edge” comedians are nothing of the sort. They are, now, part of the establishment. I was not laughing, and neither was Mr Hislop.
Anyway, later in the show the poor compere was hopelessly inept at reading out the scores. Hislop made his life hell.
That’s Private Eye’s big conundrum, isn’t it?
It’s still vital to mock the Establishment. The trouble is,
the Establishment now are people who look and sound like Ben Elton rather than Harold Macmillan, and have such a degree of self-righteousness that you can’t easily mock them. I think Hislop senses this but he’s never quite sure how to respond.
Mr Hyslop may find his job getting easier rather than harder. All he has to do is question what the establishment is saying in such a way as to make it impossible to give a logical and sensible answer. Sometimes all it takes is a raised eyebrow.
David Mitchell. One of those disproportionately high number of Guardian writers who also regularly appear on the BBC. Only got where he got because of Peep Show, which was written by someone else.
Tim, I thank you!
Did anyone notice a moment in Rich Hall’s turn during the first of the new series of “Live from the Apollo”. Amazingly he made fun of Obama’s “we’ll capture Bin Laden” priority from a perspective that was pure Bush Doctrine. Does this mean that we might even find some people able to make jokes about the next Vice President (who is, after all, a walking, talking joke generator) rather than recycling more urban myths about Sarah Palin?
Well, now we have some more footage of BBC bias that cannot be denied.
Frederick, I don’t necessarily think, in fairness to the BBC, that the show was being “biased” here. Rather, a particular individual was showing his bias, and rather gratifyingly, one of the guests on the show made it pretty damn clear what he thought of it.
Much of the show was quite funny, in a grim sort of way.
David Mitchell plays a good part in Peep Show (written by others, as noted above), but his political views are fairly standard left wing luvvie. He supported Red Ken over BoJo on the grounds that the Mayor of London should not be a comedian. I had thought that Johnson was an MP and journalist, but Mitchell obviously disagreed. Thankfully the people of London disagreed with him, and voted the Commie out.
I must say his remark about it being a good idea to arrest Conservative MP’s was standard 1980’s anti-Thatch brain dead boilerplate. It didn’t get a laugh either. Fuck him, and fuck the horse he rode on.
Pretty much all British comedians are left wing, and the few who arn’t dont get allowed on the telly.
Mitchell is crabby at the best of times, but on this show he is spectacularly crabby.
In fact he looked very ill to me.
Much like my dad used to look after one of his recurring bouts of malaria.
Most comedians on the BBC are lefties, but pop down to your local comedy store and you’ll struggle to find many lefties around. Another difference, many of the people at the comedy store are very funny. Many of the lefties beloved by the BBC – Mitchell, Brigstocke, Andy Parsons, Steel, Hardy, Toksvig amongst many others – are spectacularly unfunny.
RE: Johnathon’s point that it was Mitchell’s bias rather than the BBC’s. This may be true but when it appears to be a prerequisite to be at least as far left as the SWP in order to get a gig doing comedy on the BBC, you need to take a good look at the organisation as well as the individual.
RE: Hislop. There is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that he, too, leans towards the left – Spitting Image was invented as an anti-Thatcher show for example; however I can’t agree with Manuel, Private Eye is always relevant, and Hislop’s appearances on TV are as good as ever.
I remember a few years back Mark Steel was on HIGNFY, and the European Constitution issue came up. Hislop started attacking the EU, drawing a mix of nervous laughter and stunned expressions from the rest of the panel and audience. Steel then started having a go at him in typical leftist fashion – i.e, accused him of being a xenophobe – to which Hislop replied something along the lines of: “I’ve been to more foreign countries than you’ve had hot dinners mate, so put a sock in it”.
Good stuff.
Random P: Actually, Toksvig’s column in the Sunday Telegraph (the Telegraph! Right on, sister!) is actually rather good, in a whimsical sort of way. The rest of them are as funny as a train wreck, with the possible exception of Hardy failing to sing on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, but that’s “laughing at“, not “with”.
As for Hislop, it’s harder to call than it first appears. My gut feeling is that he’s a classical liberal, but his anti-Thatcher stance in the ’80s actually suggests “old Tory” to me, rather than “socialist”. I don’t think he’d find much to complain about in the Tamworth Manifesto: preserving our institutions and all that. He’s on record – in his programme about the history of satire – as saying the true satirist is essentially conservative, not radical, forever complaining about how things are going to the dogs without necessarily offering a solution. This might not chime well with his magazine’s early history, but he wasn’t in charge back then.
Mind you, I don’t read it myself, and fully expect to get shot down in flames by commenters armed with leftist quotes…
The iron law of satire is that the satirist must always be on the side of the underdog, and must be against the powerful. To be otherwise is simply to be a bully.
When the underdog becomes the upperdog, and the opposition become the establishment, the satirist must either change sides, or find a new job.
Hislop gets this. Mitchell apparently doesn’t.
Mitchell’s comment about the episode being like something from the daily mail was probably written for him – the compère’s part is basically scripted. IH’s retort and Mitchells comeback sounded ad lib to me. However his comeback was more along the lines of ‘there are worse things to do with 20 policemen’, and yes, it got a weak laugh, and was a weak line.
I also raised an eyebrow at this, but it says more about the editors for keeping this material in than it says about Mitchell or the zeitgeist. The people on the show are under pressure to come up with a lot of good lines – many are failures and are edited out.
I daresay that Mitchell fits the general lefty media profile, but I don’t think there’s anything special about this episode.
Sam Duncan
Interesting thoughts on Hislop. I do hope you’re right – mine was merely a vague opinion based on little evidence. Whatever political hue he is, he does not shove it down our throats, and that – along with his sharp humour and superb magazine – is one reason to like him. Wish the same could be said for Mitchell and his ilk.
Insofar as the Eye has a discernible political philosophy, and I think it does, it is actually rather conservative. It is very protective of individual liberties and the old Constitution, very anti-EU, hugely critical of modernism in literature and architecture, scathing towards all forms of political correctness, and sceptical of special interest groups of all stripes (from Stonewall to the CBI). The Eye is part of a long – and peculiarly English – tradition of satire which is simultaneously silly and brilliant, biting and good-natured, serious and curmudgeonly. The sentiment behind it is not “vive la revolution!” or inane platitudes about progress, but rather a long sigh, a weary look – a recognition, perhaps, that ‘twas ever thus.
James – that’s close, but as I recall it was “I’ve had more French baguettes than you’ve pretended to have Lancashire hot pots!” He said it well too.
Manuel II Paleologus is quite right in saying “It’s still vital to mock the Establishment. The trouble is, the Establishment now are people who look and sound like Ben Elton rather than Harold Macmillan”. I would go further and say that it is almost always difficult, and often brave, to mock the real establishment, who are invariably the most fashionable and self-assured people in the country, and the most adept at put-downs. As soon as it gets easier to mock them, that is a sure sign that they are no longer the establishment. When TW3 mocked Macmillan he was already on the slide as an establishment figure, and the mockers were starting to stake their claims as the new nomenklatura.
I once saw David Mitchell describe himself on a late night discussion show as a Libertarian – and went on to give a pretty good definition of Libertarianism.
The trouble here for me is that the phrase “Daily Mail reader” has become conventional-speak for labeling what the bulk of people in this country are likely to think or understand. It lumps together a lot of people who don’t agree with much of the lefty claptrap but yet must have voted for the reds in enough numbers in 97 to put Nulab in power.
Still, this swathe of people are mocked routinely for seemingly being a narrow-minded and reactionary group, and most ‘comedians’ rely on this standard reference for cheap laughs in the same way that the vile word “Bush” is used. If you come across a comedian dying on his feet he or she can smoothly switch to mentioning Bush or the Daily Mail to get some much needed laughter.
Actually “Super Mac” was rather pro people who “mocked the establishment” in the sense of people who attacked Western Civilization and its defenders. Harold Macmillian was rather a dodgy person – but still that is water under the bridge now.
It is true that the B.B.C. favours leftist comics – indeed many of them have belonged to Marxist organizations.
However, there is a new development that has caught my attention.
Leftist comics used to be “comics” – they cracked jokes. They were leftist jokes, but they were jokes.
However, these days there are people who the B.B.C. pushes hard as comics who do not make a jokes, they are not even trying to be funny.
A good example of this is an upper class leftist by the name of Marcus Brigstock – I have seen him on a late night show (a politics show of Andrew Neil’s) and heard him on the radio, and he does not even try to make jokes.
He just reads out (as if from a telephone directory) establishment (real establishment – i.e. the leftists who control the universities, the administrative structure of government, and just about everything else) propaganda.
Pro E.U., pro “Social Justice”, pro “progressive education”, and so on.
And he reads out this leftist establishment propaganda in a boring way – with no humour in what he is saying, not even leftist humour.
I must stress that he is not being “ironic” or using “satire”, he just reads out boring leftist establishment stuff.
It is like a government report.
By the way….
People who have a very high degree of self righteousness (and yet do great harm) are rather easy to attack.
It is a question of whether Mr Hislop (and others) really want to attack them – for to attack them full blast and all the time would mean breaking ties with the left.
Something that did not bother P.J. O’R – but MIGHT bother Mr Hislop. It is up to him whether it does or not.
Tom Wolfe managed to attack the self righteousness of the left (and how it covered up both the harm they did and their personal corruption), and still (I am told) be invited to all the left establishment events.
But this is difficult thing to manage.
If one attacks the left, HARD, they are not going to be friendly.
Which is fair enough.
The real difference between Hislop and many of the BBC comedians is that Hislop is objective.
Hislop is a real satirist, Brigstocke who has zero capacity for objectivity, is patently not. If you only mock one side, then you are not a satirist, you are a propagandist.
Yes, the Daily Mail does have absurd tendencies, but then so does the Guardian, Independent, etc.
There are good comedians on the BBC; Milton Jones, Frankie Boyle, Doc Brown, Dara O’Brain. I think the mark of a good comedian is that you should not be able to easily discern his political leanings or beliefs.
The difference between Hislop and Mitchell on this occasion was that Mitchell was trying to keep it funny (it’s a comedy show) and Hislop was having a rant.
By the way, if you’re going to devote an entire post to slagging someone off wouldn’t it be a good idea to
a) quote them correctly?
b) find out their name?
Then Mitchell obviously failed. Hey, locking up MPs I don’t agree with, what a funny guy!
As for not remembering the words exactly, I pointed out that I quoted the gist of the remarks to the best of my ability.
Why the snide remark: you sympathise with the government or something?
I make no apologies for writing about the programme: it is, as I said, a sign of how opinion is running. Would you prefer it if we all chuckled away and then rolled over?
Jerk.
I just think that if you’re going to do a hatchet job on somebody you should at least quote them correctly/ link to the original source, so that people can make their own minds up.
Would it have been so hard for you to go onto iplayer and watch the first five minutes of the programme to find out his name or even to flick through to transcribe the whole 50 seconds worth of footage which you were talking about?
One of the commenters above seems to think you were referring to Marcus Brigstocke, which kind of proves my point.
My complaint isn’t about Damian Green or the government it is about you making sweeping statements about ‘lefty comedians’ being part of the establishment when you don’t even know the name of the principle one you’re talking about, let alone anything else about him.
Oh and I just noticed your sign-off.
Classy.
Aha, I see this AdamB character is the guy who writes the lamentable “tory troll” blog. I bet he just loves the idea of arresting MPs he doesn’t like on trumped-up charges, doesn’t he?
“Aha, I see this AdamB character is the guy who writes the lamentable “tory troll” blog.”
touche!
“I bet he just loves the idea of arresting MPs he doesn’t like on trumped-up charges, doesn’t he?”
Who are you talking to and what is this based on? Why can’t you just respond to my point?
Like I said, i quoted the guy from memory. If you want to put up a link, go ahead. I saw a re-run of the show the other night (repeats!), and as far as I can see, my rendition of the quotes if broadly accurate. Actually, the remark about the Daily Mail by Mitchell is, arguably, even worse the second time I saw it.
I made it clear that I did not know straight away what the “comedian’s” name was although I recognised him. It was not a clincher for my point, which is that what he said was oh so-typical of knee-jerk assumptions that anyone who makes remarks like Hislop did is a sort of cretinous Daily Mail reader.
I certainly hope you are bothered by the Damian Green episode, since of course the powers used could be directed at other politicians of other parties. The Tories, let’s not forget, have dirt on their hands as well when it comes to fitting up MPs and passing such nonsense as the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act.
I don’t know why you couldn’t just have made that response to start with. Slagging off my blog, calling me a jerk, and accusing me of being for the locking up politicians I don’t agree with doesn’t exactly paint a great picture.
I thought that your original post was a lazy one and didn’t take the care to accurately represent the people you were attacking – so I said so.
Surely your open to criticism here.
Well I probably blew a gasket at what I thought was a pretty snide comment, but I apologise. Your overall tone was that this was all a bit madeup. It wasn’t.
But really – your general remark seemed to be that because i did not provide a link or recite the exchange down to the last semi-colon, that the posting was nothing more than a hatchet job. Give me a bit of credit: I said I recited the gist of the comment; I also pointed out that it was rather revealing that a man – D. Mitchell – said what he did on a supposed satire show. He came across as a nob; I reacted, as did Hislop. Good for him.
My point was slightly different.
There are comics who mock both sides. Jay Leno is a example – he is a Democrat but he mocks them as well as Republicans.
And their are comics who are blatently partisan – Letterman and “Jon Stewart” spring to mind.
But they are still comics.
My point about Brigstock (or however his name is spelt) is that he (and some others) are not comics at all. They do not really make jokes or engage in humour – they just read out leftist establisment propaganda.
Just like a government report. Which they clearly believe in, they are not being ironic or engaging in satire.
This is not “left wing humour” because it is not humour.